Protecting the Last Ocean: Go Big or Go Home

The largest marine reserve in the world could be created by people in this room over the next few days.

I’m in Tasmania for the annual meeting of the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR). I’m here not as a representative of Greenpeace, but as a member of the United States delegation. There are fourteen of us on the delegation: two from the State Department, nine from NOAA, one from the National Science Foundation, one from the fishing industry, and yours truly. Whatever hat I’m wearing, the conservation community and the US government team have one big shared goal for this meeting: create a large marine reserve to protect the Ross Sea, which scientists have identified as the most pristine shallow sea in the world.

Home to more penguins than both Happy Feet movies combined, along with millions of petrels, hundreds of thousands of seals, and a species of killer whale that is found nowhere else on earth, the Ross Sea is not exactly your average coastal sea. There are also gazillions of krill, enough to feed all those minke whales the Japanese fleet travels all the way to the Ross Sea to kill.

Aside from Japanese whaling, the only extractive industry in the Ross Sea is fishing for toothfish, often marketed as Chilean seabass. There’s enough money involved that winning protections for the Ross Sea is not going to be an easy task. Due to the somewhat arcane rules of CCAMLR, I’m not able to tell you anything about how the conversations are going here until the end of the meeting.